Pratt Institute

Alumni Profile: Lenore Lucey, B. Arch. '70

While being introduced at a lecture once, Lenore Lucey, B. Arch. '70 was called "the poster child for alternative careers in architecture." While she enjoys designing, she finds the administrative side of the profession to be more her calling. Since becoming a licensed architect, she has spent much of her career at the helm of the field's most prominent professional organizations.

Since 1997, she has been the executive vice president of the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB), the profession's chief oversight body. She has been instrumental in setting national standards so architects are educated, appropriately trained, and can take one exam to be licensed in all 50 states and four territories; she has also created mechanisms to license internationally trained architects.

"The appeal of running an architectural organization like NCARB is that you are an integral part of deciding what form the future of the profession will take," she says.

While at Pratt in the 1960s, Lucey studied with Stanley Salzman, William Breger and the late Sidney Katz, and had part-time jobs at Breger's and Katz's firms. Often she worked on similar projects at work and in school, learning from both.

"It was phenomenal working in the office and hearing the discussion about where the project was going, then formulating my own ideas for class."

She worked at architecture firms after graduation. In 1978 she took a job with broadcast giant ABC as a real estate and construction director.

In 1986, having become active in the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, she became the chapter's first female executive director, serving until 1994. 
When she landed the position at the NCARB, she was that organization's first female executive vice president as well.

Lucey plans to leave NCARB next year and, she jokes, hopes to "find out what I want to be when I grow up." But really, she says, she did most of her growing up at Pratt.

"My professors and the speakers we had, and working at architecture firms-all of it was very eye opening for me," she says. "I was 17 when I started college. I was a kid, and I grew up at Pratt."